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Thought it worth having a general thread on this. Some more specific threads on potential fakes:
Crystal skull:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/crystal-skulls.394/
King Solomon's treasure:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/king-solomons-treasure-is-fake.19581/
Jesus' ossuary:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/jesus-brothers-bones-the-james-ossuary.6101/
Vinland Map:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-vinland-map.4607/
Baby dragon in a jar:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/baby-dragon-found-in-oxfordshire.12979/
and an article:
Source
Crystal skull:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/crystal-skulls.394/
King Solomon's treasure:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/king-solomons-treasure-is-fake.19581/
Jesus' ossuary:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/jesus-brothers-bones-the-james-ossuary.6101/
Vinland Map:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-vinland-map.4607/
Baby dragon in a jar:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/baby-dragon-found-in-oxfordshire.12979/
and an article:
Old often new with 'relics'
By JACKIE LOOHAUIS
[email protected]
Posted: Feb. 21, 2005
Psst - Hey, you! Yeah, you, the museum guy. C'mere.
Have I got a deal for you! Right here outta my car trunk I'm selling the actual plastic box King Tut was buried in. Not interested?
Then how about these two genuine Christopher Columbus skulls: one from when he was a kid and one when he was an old man. Or maybe this 9th-century Viking map of Sheboygan? You can buy them all at wholesale. Just don't ask too many questions.. . .
Museum curators hear spiels like this more often than the public knows. That's because the grand art of faking antiquities is almost as old as history. And today more than ever, fakery is for real.
Recently, Israeli police broke up a ring of alleged con men accused of forging such headline-grabbing relics as the "James Ossuary," a 2,000-year-old burial box bearing the Aramaic inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." The box turned out to be ancient, but the inscription was slightly newer. Late 20th century.
The ossuary put a spotlight on how fakes not only make news but can warp history. As Israeli officials tally up the number of forgeries the bunco ring allegedly concocted (dozens), experts worldwide are reviewing the flimflam in their own fields.
They don't have to look far.
"All collections have fakes," says Jane Walsh, the anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, known worldwide for exposing dozens of frauds including the legendary "Crystal Skull," a supposedly supernatural Aztec relic.
Alex Barker, curator of anthropology at the Milwaukee Public Museum, adds: "Ninety percent of the things I see are not real."
But they are imaginative. Milwaukee, for example, seems to attract "original" copies of the 1776 Declaration of Independence.
"If I've seen one, I've seen one a year," Barker says. "People bring them in convinced they're real. The fun part is I can show them how to make some more. It's a technique for aging paper where you bake it with milk in the oven."
But what about that Spanish conquistador helmet someone brought in allegedly from the 1539 Hernando DeSoto expedition? Says Barker, "It had a stamp on it reading 'Made in Mexico.' "
OK, so slightly more recent. But the hoax helmet doesn't come close in audacity to the most fabulous fake in the Milwaukee Public Museum's collection: "The Mermaid."
The Mermaid came to the museum in about 1900 and now resides in a Victorian wood-and-glass case only occasionally placed on public display. About a foot long, the Mermaid has the head of a tiny grimacing human attached to what looks like a carp tail. Its handwritten label describes the finny fiend as a "mermaid" captured off the waters of "Northern Japan in 1863." The angry-looking little being is, in a bizarre way, mesmerizing.
But, alas, though it may have convinced 19th-century audiences caught up in the first wave of Darwinism, this mermaid never evolved from any living species.
"The head is made of papier-mache with a fish skin pulled over the end," Barker says with a sigh. P.T. Barnum would have gone ape over it.
Wisconsin seems to have a proclivity for fakery. Barker recalls the tale of "The Spencer Lake Horse Skull," which unfolded in 1936. Milwaukee Public Museum Curator W.C. McKern found a preserved horse skull at the base of an Indian mound dating from a time when conventional history says the horse was extinct in the Americas.
If real, the skull would have "changed American archaeology, paleontology, zoology and biogeography forever," Barker says. Instead - not so much. Turns out that the skull had been planted in the mound by a chuckling crew of college students who had looted the mound and then sophomorically tossed a modern horse's skull inside.
It was a simple prank. But experts say that horseplay is not usually the motive for creating phony artifacts.
'The true believers'
According to Barker, there are several categories of fakes. Some are "imaginative fakes," created out of something that looks real but isn't.
"Someone picks up a rock, which they think is a stone tool. In their minds they've created something out of nothing." These folks offer their stuff to museums as treasure, but curators don't usually accept them.
The creation of fakes for a profit motive is easy to understand. But then you have "the true believers," those who manufacture evidence to support a belief. Those artifacts may range from slivers of "The True Cross" to Yale's Vinland map, which probably was created to prove that the Vikings landed in America before Columbus.
We must also add to the collection those fakes created out of pure nastiness.
That's what may have happened in the case of one of the world's most famous hoaxes, Piltdown Man. In 1911, a group of distinguished British scientists found what they claimed were fossils proving that the "missing link" between man and ape had once lived in England.
But in 1953, Piltdown was declared a hoax, the bones stained with chemicals to make them look old. Theories abound over whodunit; even Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doylehas cropped up in the suspect lineup.
But professional jealousy remains a probable motive for the case. PBS.org quotes a 1953 Bulletin of the British National History Museum that called the hoax "so entirely unscrupulous as to find no parallel in the history of paleontological discovery." The bogus bones made fools of experts for decades, and someone snickered knowingly at the scientists' expense.
All that glitters . . .
What kind of fakes are most often foisted? Anything in easy-to-manipulate gold, for one thing. Egyptian frauds are perennials. So are pre-Columbian Mexican hoaxes, says Walsh.
Also, beware if someone offers to sell you a fabulous religious object like the James Ossuary.
Bennet Bronson, curator of Asian archaeology and ethnology at Chicago's Field Museum, says, "Religious objects continue to be faked: biblical, Judaic, Hindu. People have been peddling pieces of Noah's Ark in the U.S. forever. People are terribly credulous, so eager to prove the Bible is true. As cynics point out, there are enough pieces of 'The True Cross' to make 15 crosses."
Antique furniture also attracts the labors of con-men, as "Antique Roadshow" devotees already know. Still, it's a warning that collectors can forget when faced with a seductive chest-of-drawers. So much phony furniture has fooled buyers that in 2002 the Milwaukee Art Museum staged the "Furniture Fakes from the Chipstone Collection" exhibition, a cautionary lesson.
Fakery often follows fads. Bronson tells of one of the newest forms of deception coming across curators' desks: "ancient Norse" tablets that aren't actually written in ancient Norse. Instead, "they're runes from J.R.R. Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings,' " Bronson says. At least most don't translate into "Frodo lives!"
Beware 'The Rescued Princess'
So just how do scholars tell a fake from the real thing? First off, curators use what is scientifically known as "gut feelings," says Barker. Objects are suspect when they seem too good to be true or are linked with famous names. Bloody Mary's bloody mary, that sort of thing.
"Sometimes it's not anything specific, but a combination of things" says Walsh. "Sometimes it's the right kind of depiction of a figurine, but it's the wrong material. Perhaps it's too shiny or not shiny enough. They also have the problem that they don't seem to be related or look like anything anyone had ever dug up. Crystal skulls are all over the place, but no one ever seems to have actually dug one up."
Experts also judge objects by three criteria, Barker says: "Provenience. Exactly where did it come from? Provenance. From the time it was found in that location, who had it? And professional judgment. When something fits your models too well, it's easy to screw it up."
Bronson offers another couple of caveats. Beware of objects with stories attached about princesses in distress or hidden mystic caves.
"There are two kinds of stories. One is 'The Rescued Princess Story.' It usually comes with a Japanese or Chinese object people bring in. They say that around 1900 some relative, often Grandpa, was in Asia and was given this object as a reward for rescuing a princess. Invariably Gramps bought it in San Francisco in 1930.
"Then you have The Cave Story. I've heard The Cave from Vietnam, Okinawa, the Philippines, twice from Indonesia. Any place you have caves and soldiers. It's always some American going in a cave and finding some object, and he senses something mystical about it and is told by a local to keep the object hidden because it's so magically powerful. It turns out he bought it in some shop."
These grifter tales give themselves away. And there are many other ways to detect fakes; archaeologists have a quiver-full of new technological weapons such as thermoluminescence to date objects. But "fakers still stay ahead," says Bronson.
So scholars must learn to live with fakes, and perhaps even enjoy a laugh over them.
Chicago's Field Museum has a display case happily exhibiting some of the best Egyptian frauds they've uncovered in their own collection. And the Milwaukee Public Museum plans to sell replicas of a Pre-Columbian terra-cotta head labeled for what it is: a phony.
"My experience with big museums is that the people there are interested in research and are not at all troubled if something in their collection is found to be a fake," Walsh says.
If nothing else, the frauds serve to validate a notion that's been around as long as mankind. Says Bronson, "There are a lot of suckers out there."
Four Not For Real
The Hitler Diaries
Purported to be written by the Third Reich's Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, the notebooks were at first authenticated by such scholars as Hugh Trevor-Roper. In 1983, Stern magazine paid $6 million for the diaries' publishing rights, and Newsweek ran a cover story on them. In fact, the diaries were forged by a German military antiques dealer.
The Cardiff Giant
In 1868, New York/Wisconsin cigar maker George Hull decided to ridicule literalists who believed biblical giants had actually existed. He had a Chicago sculptor fashion a crude figure of a man out of rock, which was then "discovered" after being planted in the ground. Thousands of people - not a few of them scientists - came to view and believe in the "petrified man."
The Vinland Map
This map is an anachronism in more ways than one. Apparently created to "prove" that the Vikings had beaten Columbus to America early in the 15th century, the map was drawn on real medieval parchment. Trouble is, the ink was from the early-to-mid-20th century. The real irony is that since the map was concocted, actual evidence of Viking settlement dating from hundreds of years before Columbus has been uncovered in Newfoundland.
The Crystal Skull
One of the darlings of '60s New Age-ers, the Crystal Skull was purported to have been made by the Aztecs or Mayans and to possess magical powers. But anthropologist Jane Walsh of the Smithsonian has discovered microscopic mechanical grinding marks on the skull. It is a 19th-century fake, probably from Germany.
Source
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